Why we shouldn’t forgive the Republicans who sold their souls

Of the remarkable things we have learned this election year, the most significant is that the current Republican Party is unfit to lead the country. It has failed the greatest test a political leader or party can face, and failed spectacularly. It has abandoned its principles out of a combination of cowardice and opportunism. It has worked to place in the White House the most dangerous threat to U.S. democracy since the Civil War. And perhaps just as revealing, it has in the process engineered its own suicide. Not only has the party refused to save the country, but also it has proved too helpless, too incompetent and too craven even to save itself.

These are the people we’re supposed to put in charge of the House and Senate for another two years? Whom we’re then supposed to rally behind in the battle for the White House in 2020? No. Not this group. We know too much. We know all we need to know.

The coming years are going to require some courage — not tough speeches, at which Republican politicians excel, but tough and politically difficult actions — on entitlements, on immigration and especially on foreign policy and defense. Republicans used to be able to call national-security policy their strong suit. Can they still? All the tough young senators who railed at the Obama administration for its weakness on the world stage — how tough were they when it came to their own political skins? Not tough enough to take on Donald Trump, even though his foreign policy, such as it was, betrayed many core Republican principles and was in most respects far worse than President Obama’s.